Re: Generally hard

jdnicoll@xxxxxxxxx (James Nicoll) wrote:
>In article <dcm7cm$c5n$5@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
>Damien Sullivan <phoenix@xxxxxxx> wrote:
>>"htn963" <htn963@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>>
>>> Segueing this back to SF, I always get a bittersweet feeling when
>>>reading good pre-60's works that basically had a progressive,
>>>optimistic underpin, nuclear holocaust aside -- e.g. it's assumed that
>>>the Moon and Mars would be easily colonized, a unified World government
>>>is just around the corner, a milieu where society's most pressing
>>>problem is to deal with boredom rather than genocide, etc. If someone
>>>were to try that type of SF now, like Varley in _Red Thunder_, it'd be
>>>just a quaint exercise.
>>
>>See the "Quick comparison"/Scottish ScF thread. Or Kim Robinson, for just
>>Mars colonization. Some authors are insanely optimistic.
>>
> Conversely, many people are unduly pessimistic*. Others are
>both (KSR is only optimistic when it advances the plot in directions
>he likes).

BTW, I didn't really mean insanely optimistic as being, well, insane. I like
post-mortality SF, though I might doubt some of the collapses of government or
"brother, can you spare a spam filter?" (Good spam filters are open source!)
(MacLeod and Stross sometimes suffer from excessive "with-it-ness"... I guess
I should say this on the other thread.) I meant it more as emphatically
really optimistic. Yeah.

-xx- Damien X-)
.

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